Ex-NFL players’ suit over painkillers dismissed

Updated 7:28 pm, Thursday, December 18, 2014

The NFL’s contract with its players union puts the responsibility on the league’s 32 teams for hiring qualified doctors and trainers to keep their athletes healthy. According to a federal judge, that means 1,300 retired players who have sued the league for allegedly keeping them doped up on painkillers, without prescriptions or warnings, must instead file grievances with their union.

“Where health and safety are concerned, the (contracts) have allocated specific responsibilities to the clubs — but not to the league,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco said Wednesday in a ruling dismissing the suit. To evaluate the players’ claim that the league itself had been negligent in allowing them to be over-drugged, he said, “it would be necessary to consider the ways in which the NFL has indeed stepped forward and required proper medical care” — a subject of the union contracts that can be addressed only in labor-management grievances.

The proposed class-action suit was filed in May by a group of former players who included former 49ers offensive linemen Jeremy Newberry and Ron Stone. While playing for San Francisco in the early 2000s, Newberry and Stone said, they were among as many as 15 players on the team who lined up before each game, pants down, for a buttocks injection of the powerful painkiller Toradol, with no warnings of its possible side effects.

Newberry, a two-time Pro Bowler, now suffers from kidney failure, high blood pressure and violent headaches, the suit said, and Stone, a three-time All-Pro, has severe elbow and knee pain.

“Rather than allowing players the opportunity to rest and heal, the NFL has illegally and unethically substituted pain medications for proper health care to keep the NFL’s tsunami of dollars flowing,” the retired players’ lawyers said in the lawsuit. They sought damages as well as court orders requiring the league to take safety measures, including scheduling fewer games at longer intervals.

The NFL Players Association also argued that the case should proceed in court because no language in the union’s collective-bargaining agreement addresses the league’s or the teams’ responsibility to protect players from the overuse of painkillers or other drugs.

But Alsup said the contracts have required teams to provide “proper medical care in accordance with professional standards,” which can be fairly interpreted to include the safe administration of painkillers.

“In such a rough-and-tumble sport as professional football, player injuries loom as a serious and inevitable evil,” the judge said. “The league has addressed these serious concerns in a serious way — by imposing duties on the clubs via collective bargaining and placing a long line of health-and-safety duties on the team owners ... backed up by the enforcement power of the union.”

Steve Silverman, a lawyer for the players, called the ruling a “temporary legal setback” and said it was being reviewed for a possible appeal.